Attacking the clones: indie game devs fight blatant rip-offs

Clones of games are causing trouble not only for developers, but for an unwary …

Vlambeer's Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijam are getting a little tired of the industry's seemingly endless discussions about how so-called "clones" are ruining the industry. That's not because it's not an important subject, or because clones are actually harmless, but because the discussion is "kind of dead" they said.

"Even though a lot of words are said, nothing is really said," Ismail said at a presentation at the Game Developers Conference this week. The two-person indie development team, best known for titles like Super Crate Box, has been directly impacted by cloning—their iOS port of Radical Fishing was copied almost completely wholesale by Gamenauts' Ninja Fishing before the former could even hit the App Store.

With their GDC presentation, Vlambeer tried to move the cloning discussion forward by dismantling some of the less-logical arguments in favor of the practice and by offering some solutions to help mitigate cloning's effects on the industry.

Not all clones are created equal, Vlambeer said. Though all first-person shooters were at one point widely considered "Doom clones," Nijam pointed out that Duke Nukem 3D actually adds quite a bit to the Doom formula from a pure gameplay standpoint. The clones Vlambeer are concerned with are those that steal the entire set of gameplay solutions that another developer has come up with without being at all concerned with the game design problems those developers struggled with.

In their presentation, Vlambeer identified a number of logical fallacies in arguments surrounding the cloning debate. One such argument posits that game clones enable the iteration necessary to move the industry forward, an argument Ismail called "one of the weirdest things I've ever heard. Let's just make the exact same thing and that will improve stuff?"

To others that argue simple games are bound to be cloned just by dint of being so simple, Nijam gave an emphatic "Fuck you! I don't want anyone to tell me what kind of game I'm going to make letting clones limit us is horrible, and if we ever get to that point just shoot me."

The pair acknowledged that protecting game designs with patents might actually damage innovation, but argued that this sort of legal protection is separate from the issue of whether game cloning is helpful or harmful to the industry. And make no mistake, clones are hurting the industry, Nijam said, both by diverting skilled developers towards work on soulless copies and demotivating skilled developers who put a lot of effort into truly original games.

What's worse, a preponderance of low-quality clones is training consumers to expect a lack of originality in the industry, Nijam said, a loss of "gaming literacy" that drags the whole industry down. "Players will get all those bad games and stop recognizing actual good games," he said. "If you only eat bad hamburgers, you're not going to recognize a good hamburger."

The natural reaction to this kind of rampant cloning among many developers might be to hold their cards close to the vest, keeping a new idea totally secret until dropping it on an unsuspecting public. But Ismail said the solution to the cloning problem is actually the opposite—educating gamers by developing games out in the open and showing them the real work that goes into an original design. Detailed development blogs, documentaries like Indie Game: The Movie, and websites that dig deep into game design process all help improve gaming literacy among the public and build a foundation for an audience that values original games.

"We shouldn't attack cloning; we can't take it down, it's too big," Ismail said. "What we should do is make it irrelevant. Instead of trying to take them down, try to make what we do more relevant We should be talking about this stuff."

Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl